Two entries popped up in my RSS reader today that made me think about the ever-changing musical landscape: On the shifted librarian, Jenny talks about changing behaviors when it comes to music. A 9-year-old thinking of music as something you burn, not a piece of plastic, represents one of the biggest challenges to date to the music industry. While peer-to-peer networks represented the beginning of a battle, that shift in behavior among kids represents a potentially disturbing trend: if this behavior doesn’t change, 5-6 years from now (when those kids are teenager) the music industry will see steep declines in the sales of music CDs. In other words, the medium no longer matters as an entity. Recurring revenues based on changes in format (as was the case with the move from LPs to tapes, and then from tapes to CDs) will no longer exist. In a somewhat related story, Martin Tobias talks about bands selling concert videos through iTunes. This represents threat number two to the music industry in that no record label was involved in this transaction. It could be because they didn’t want to be but that’s a source of revenue that is no longer available to a…

A new survey just highlighted that three quarters of teens feel that file sharing should be legal. This pretty much caps any chance for the music industry to survive under their current model. The issue here is that if kids are perceiving file sharing as something that should be legal, they will probably not grow out of it. Half of the teens that were polled had downloaded free music and gave an interesting set of reasons: Those who download music but have never paid for a download say they download because: They only like one or two songs on a CD (59%); They want to get music quickly (48%); They believe that music is too expensive to buy (46%); They want to get music for free (44%); They want songs that are not available for sale (40%); And they believe that music should be shared (38%). There is hope though. If you look at those stats, stores like the Apple iTunes Music Store or the new Napster can satisfy over 50 percent of the public. The third point, however, shows issues relating to pricing. Obviously, the Internet has had an impact here as kids are probably more aware than their…